Send in the Clowns

Clown sightings, clown sightings everywhere.

The clown in ancient tradition is a subset of the Trickster god. Yet the clown has lost itself to its own deviancy, and as such, unlike the Trickster, has become a mouthpiece for evil. The Fool Clown’s own sentience is given over to the Evil that is has allowed itself to ingest wholly.

From Egypt, to the not so ancient American Indian tribes, as well as the world over, the clown is a figure that’s purpose can be several-fold. It can grant us perspective; by exaggerated displays of deviancy and the reversing of societal norms, the clown can serve as satire, showing us our own deviance in such a manner that we are more willing to accept our own culpability, and perhaps, change our ways.

And yet so far gone is America (and all of the West) from being able to accept such culpability, the clown represents something else for us: something of a mirror, a consequence, but one we will not accept as either, thus the clown now terrorizes. There is something to be said for the psychological symbolism of the utter fear that these peculiar clown sightings have engendered. In our deepest places, we know that we are deviant, we are liars, and that we have abandoned goodness and truth and, as Stephen King’s Roland noted, we have forgotten the Face of our Father.

So the clown terrorizes us. Rather than ponder anything beyond this terror, we sensationalize these sightings, unable at all to even begin to grasp the terribly obvious symbolism of the sudden emergence of these sightings on our Media Monster.

There need be no court of Kings to call up the Jester, the Fool, the clown as an archetype. And yet, in our West, could the notion that our so-called Democratic leadership have become our brazenly arrogant, modern incarnation of such courts be more obvious? Our leadership, whether one believes in God or not, can be agreed upon as utterly Evil in nearly every aspect. Greedy, full of deviance, hateful, spiteful, vindictive, utterly lost to themselves as well as their own, entitled arrogance.

Need there be more of a court in order to summon up this oddity of mentally-ill humans who have lost themselves to the point that they will dress in attire (the symbolism of which has likely not occurred to them at all) like clowns and thus go terrorizing innocent people? Seems fairly straightforward, when looked at within the context of our depraved and lost Western culture.

Witness also our obsession with yet darker and darker versions of the Batman’s Joker. The direction of this Fool has become darker and more fierce, as the character itself has utterly lost itself to its own deviance, and thus has, as in other cultures both modern and ancient, has become little more than a mouthpiece for Evil. Not some human evil, either, but a Primary Evil—something old, something powerful, and something that knows us far better than we. Tim Burtons Joker retained a sense of humor, at times almost aware of the necessity of his own buffoonery in order to point out the ridiculous idea of his Gotham revering a demon—the Batman himself—as the arbiter of Justice.

Chris Nolan’s Joker retained no such sense of humor. This was a clown who had lost all sanity, had walked straightway into the Abyss, and had returned scarred, damaged, ruined. His was a theory of Chaos, of Entropy, and Evil. His agenda sought to pit man against man, Good against perceived good; to set out to prove, by manipulating an entire city through both low and high tech wizardry, that there simply existed no such thing as Goodness at all. His mission was suicidal, not merely his own death, but that of all those around him within Gotham.

Finally, we reach David Ayer’s Joker, an utter sexual deviant sporting silver teeth, looking more and more like the demon that he’d clearly given himself over to. His girlfriend he subjected to torture, both mental and physical, and his goal was not mere chaos and entropy, but to utterly destroy a flawed creature (Harleen Quinzel). His mission was far more than the destruction of Gotham nor the Batman. His mission was the destruction of a human soul, and his success was brilliant, turning the flawed Harleen into the utterly lost Harley Quinn.

Since the West has allowed itself to be utterly robbed of the wisdom of understanding symbolism and something ancient that some call ‘Twilight language,’ our understanding of this peculiar clown phenomenon, which has been going on since 1981 in lesser ways, is null and void. There is nothing most can garner from this phenomenon, other than the fact that it is all ‘creepy.’

If we only had any idea just how far that rabbit hole we call ‘creepy’ goes down, we’d take stock more in our own evil, and then go out and deal with these lost souls in the manner that befits them—destruction, utter and complete.